Trade reforms and wage inequality in Colombia

We investigate the effects of the drastic tariff reductions of the 1980s and 1990s in Colombia on the wage distribution. We identify three main channels through which the wage distribution was affected: increasing returns to college education, changes in industry wages that hurt sectors with initially lower wages and a higher fraction of unskilled workers, and shifts of the labor force towards the informal sector that typically pays lower wages and offers no benefits. Our results suggest that trade policy played a role in each of the above cases. The increase in the skill premium was primarily driven by skilled-biased technological change; however, our evidence suggests, that this change may have been in part motivated by the tariff reductions and the increased foreign competition to which the trade reform exposed domestic producers. With respect to industry wages, we find that wage premiums decreased by more in sectors that experienced larger tariff cuts. Finally, we find some evidence that the increase in the size of the informal sector is related to increased foreign competition – sectors with larger tariff cuts and more trade exposure, as measured by the size their imports, experience a greater increase in informality, though this effect is concentrated in the years prior to the labor market reform. Nevertheless, increasing returns to education, and changes in industry premiums and informality alone cannot fully explain the increase in wage inequality we observe over this period. This suggests that overall the effect of the trade reforms on the wage distribution may have been small

Technological roots and structural implications of the double bubble at the turn of the Century

This paper argues that the two boom and bust episodes of the turn of the Century – the Internet mania and crash of 1990s and the easy liquidity boom and bust of 2000s– are two distinct components of a single structural phenomenon. They are essentially the equivalent of 1929 developed in two stages, one centred on technological innovation, the other on financial innovation. Hence, the frequent references to that crash, to the 1930s and to Bretton Woods, are not simple journalistic metaphors for interpreting the “credit crunch” and its solution, but rather the intuitive recognition of a fundamental similarity between those events and the current ones. The paper holds that such major boom and bust episodes are endogenous to the way in which the market economy evolves and assimilates successive technological revolutions. It will discuss why it occurred in two bubbles on this occasion; it examines the differences and continuities between the two episodes and presents an interpretation of their nature and consequences

Real and Monetary Challenges to Wage Policy in Germany at the Turn of the Millennium: Technical Progress, Globalization and European Monetary Union

At the turn of the millennium three frequently cited potential causes of new challenges for wage p olicy in Germany are revisited in this study: skilled-biased technological progress, the increasing international integration of labor and product markets, and the monetary integration of the EMU. While there is now a fairly broad consensus on the basic fa cts about the development of wages and employment across skill groups, there is considerable disagreement to explain these trends, in particular to what extent skill-biased technical change and trade liberalization share a major responsibility. The conclusion of this paper is that both factors are at work with a slight emphasis on the first candidate. Moreover, while EMU in our opinion does not represent the major threat for wage policy, it is the Single Market which requires wage policy to be on the lookout and to meet those challenges.Monetary UnionWages, wage structure, skill-biased technological change, international trade, European Monetary Union, globalisation, globalization

Testing Creative Destruction in an Opening Economy: the Case of the South African Manufacturing Industries

We study a Lucas (1978) "fruit-tree" economy under the assumption that agents are Choquet expected utility (CEU) rather than standard expected utility (EU) decision makers. The agents’ non-additive beliefs about the economy’s stochastic dividend payment process may thus express ambiguity attitudes and accommodate violations of Savage’s sure-thing principle as elicited by Ellsberg (1961). As our main formal result we establish the existence of a unique stationary equilibrium price function for the assets in this economy. In order to account for the dynamic inconsistency of CEU decision makers, we thereby use an equilibrium concept that combines the market clearing condition of general equilibrium theory with Bayesian Nash equilibrium. A simple example about the equity premium in our economy with non-additive beliefs illustrates our formal findings.

Exchange Rate Regimes for the New Member States of the European Union

One important issue for the new Member States (NMS) of the EU is the choice of the exchange rate regime that will allow them to participate successfully in the EMU process. Two exchange rate arrangements, compatible with the EU Treaty and ERM2 regulations, deserve special attention: flexible exchange rate regime and currency board with respect to the euro. The first regime (within stipulated bands), coupled with an inflation targeting scheme, agrees with the spirit of the European Commission and absorbs more easily supply shocks and Balassa Samuelson effects (which are present in real convergence and catching up episodes). It also prompts the process of nominal convergence. The second regime is suited to countries that need to foster the credibility of their monetary policy, but makes real adjustments to country-specific shocks and Balassa-Samuelson effects more difficult and/or costly. In this paper we investigate the dynamics of output and inflation under each exchange rate regime in NMS during the post EU accession and Maastricht phases. For that purpose, our model extends Gerlach and Smets (2000) and Detken and Gaspar (2003), icluding market distortions and three possible exchange rate regimes. In the empirical part of the paper we estimate SVAR models, following Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1993) methodology, in order to extract variances and covariances between shocks to each NMS and to the euro zone and compute individual social losses under each exchange rate arrangement. We use monthly data on industrial production and CPI for eight NMS countries. Our main result is that the optimal choice varies depending on the institutional and structural features of each economy, and on the likely source and nature of economic shocks to which it is exposed with respect to the whole euro area. Interestingly, the results for each country seem to conform to the general prescriptions that one would derive from the theory of optimal currency areasEU enlargment, exchange rate systems, SVAR, European monetary integration

Quality-Oriented Technical Change in Japanese Wheat Breeding

The article presents a productivity analysis of Japanese Wheat Breeding research. Given recent policy change, wheat breeders may breed high quality, i.e. high protein content, wheat. We regard breeding research as multi-output process, and examine breeding program with output distance function. Also, we will analyze the effect of gene recharge rate on breeding productivity, and withdraw the policy implication for property rights.Wheat Breeding Research, Induced Innovation, Wheat Quality, Gene Recharge, Crop Production/Industries, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Capital Based Macroeconomic model and 100 percent reserve system, free banking system and BFH system: A Comparism among Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.

This essay extends the capital based macroeconomic theory to include international capital flow thus extending it to an open economy and analyze it in the context of the BFH system, Free banking system and 100 percent reserve ration. In all these, it was noticed that interest rate will barely change even though the possibility of interest rate changes was not ruled out completely. A test of these systems was conducted on Latvia, Lithuanian, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and was successful. However, it must be noted that these are just prepositions as these system are not in place at the moment. In furtherance to this, past and present monetary system used by the countries exhibited similarities to these systems, even though difference could largely be seen